Converting small-ish Oracle long raw values to other types

Question

I have an Oracle table that contains a field of LONG RAW type that contains ASCII character data. How can I write a query or view that will convert this to a more easily consumed character string? These are always going to be single-byte characters, FWIW.

Answer 1

I found this quote:

In Oracle9i, you can even:

alter table old_table modify ( c clob );

to convert it.

See here: http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:1037232794454

Edit

The max length of a varchar2 column is 4000. Is that too short?

Answer 2

I have found this works well on CLOB data types. I would believe the same would hold true for LOB types.

create or replace function lob2char(clob_col clob) return varchar2 IS
buffer varchar2(4000);
amt BINARY_INTEGER := 4000;
pos INTEGER := 1;
l clob;
bfils bfile;
l_var varchar2(4000):='';
begin
LOOP
if dbms_lob.getlength(clob_col)<=4000 THEN
dbms_lob.read (clob_col, amt, pos, buffer);
l_var := l_var||buffer;
pos:=pos+amt;
ELSE
l_var:= 'Cannot convert.  Exceeded varchar2 limit';
exit;
END IF;
END LOOP;
return l_var;
EXCEPTION
WHEN NO_DATA_FOUND THEN
return l_var;
END;



INSERT INTO NEWTABLE (NEWCOLUMN) SELECT RTRIM(lob2char(OLDCOLUMN)) FROM OLDTABLE;

Answer 3

Maybe

select ...., to_lob(long_raw) from old_table

(http://www.psoug.org/reference/convert_func.html)

or

UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_VARCHAR2(b)

(http://www.dbasupport.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5342).